We have been an exhibitor at the INTA annual meeting for the past four years. There we meet attorneys from all over the world, with a majority of Americans. Now we decided to try to meet our European clients and potential clients in a trademark congress/exhibition.

So on the 24th and 25th of November we will be exhibiting at the IP Service World 2014 in Munich (Holiday Inn City Center).

If you are in Munich, come by our booth and you will get a free Comprehensive Search Report for all 28 EU states plus OHIM and WIPO. Our normal price for this is 449 EUR. If you cannot make it to Munich, send me an email and I will give you a free trial (benoit at markify.com).

We have now added the Canadian trademark database (CIPO) to our searching and monitoring services. We have made some adjustments to our system to handle that Canada not yet fully use the Nice classification system.

The price for a Comprehensive Search, or a Full Availability Search, as some providers call it, is set at USD 81 (or 59 EUR). For that you get our best-in-class similarity search algorithm that finds 99% of all confusingly similar trademarks– and with less “noise”. It is actually the best trademark similarity search in the world (see search report here).

Do you want to try one Comprehensive Search Report for free? Send me an email and I will send you the promotion code (benoit at markify.com).

We also offer our Knockout Plus Search for Canada for only USD 40. This is “broad” knockout, finding both identical, phonetically identical and other very similar results. Approx. 60% of all potential conflicts but with only 10% of the list length. This is the professional choice for any name screening project or for an application on a tight budget.

You find the watching service here and the yearly price is only USD 34. Every week you get one report per client. And you get the same strong similirity algorithm so you will not miss any potential conflicts. Combine it with US watch if you need.

To the lucky few at the INTA Annual meeting 2014 in Hong Kong, starting this weekend:

All attendees who leave a business card in our booth (number 725) will win one prize, and one attendee will win two:

1. One lucky winner will once again walk away with an iPad. We were the first firm to offer give away a free iPad, back in INTA San Francisco 2011. There are still few other rivalining products. Maybe next year in San Diego….

2. ALL others will win a FREE Comprehensive Trademark Search Report. You can choose between different reports, covering up to 28 EU countries (value 450 EUR) or a US Full availability (USD129). See all choices here

Come by, with questions and business cards, and you will ALL be rewarded!

“Listen to the customer” is a popular, and often a very good, advice when you develop your products and services. We didn’t just listen, we sat down with some of our best trademark attorney clients and discussed for hours.

“How can we at Markify help you serve your clients better?” was our main question.

The core answer, from both small and big firms, was rather simple:

“We like your searching and watching services. We love the accuracy of your trademark search algorithm. And the Markify pricing is amazing.

But, your services need to cover more trademark, domain name and common law databases.”

So the last year our team have been busy adding new databases to our comprehensive searching and monitoring services for trademarks and domain names.

Our geographical focus in this process has been the 28 EU countries, the US and the new gTLDs. We start here, but we will not stop here . . .

You find detailed descriptions, samples and pricing of our new offers here:

Markify is now adding domain names from all the new gTLDs, as they are being released, to our global Domain Name Watch service. And the price remains the lowest in the industry: $29/year per watched brand.

If you are in the process of evaluating different domain name watch services (sometimes called Brand Monitor, Brand Alert or Domain Monitor), you should know that there two things that set Markify apart:

1. Similar results

We will not only give you identical matches of the brand, but also phonetically identical and phonetically similar results. To our knowledge, no one else does this.

So if you are Pepsi Co and want to be alerted when confusingly similar domain names are being registered, you will get reports with results like this from us:

PEPPSI.com

PEPSEE.camera

BUYPEPSINOW.net

PEHPSI.org

PEBSI.guru

PEPSI. de

2. Best price

We believe all brands should be able to afford a domain name watch. And the cost for monitoring your brands at Markify is only $29/year per watched brand.

For this price we will watch your brand in the old (.com, .net, .org etc) and new gTLDs and in more than 200 ccTLDs (.de, .fr, .se, .jp etc).

This low price also means that you can easily monitor hundreds of brands. A lot of trademark attorneys put in their whole portfolio of trademarks into the Markify domain name watch system. Then they offer their clients to monitor the reports for a fee (maybe $200/year). And when there is an infringing domain name, they alert the client and may get new work. A win-win situation.

If you have found a better or cheaper domain name monitor service, please send me an email at benoit at markify.com. Thanks!

During the INTA (International Trademark Association) Annual Meeting in Dallas last week we choose once again to be an exhibitor. It was our third Annual Meeting after San Francisco 2011 and Washington DC 2012. These meetings gather more than 8000 trademark attorneys and domain name professionals.

For a start-up it is always difficult to decide where to put your limited marketing dollars. But I must admit that I love these types of exhibitions or trade shows. There are four major reasons why we choose to invest in these events:

Market overview. You get a very good sense of what services are out there and you get a chance to talk to the different service providers.

Future sales. The contacts for future sales are very valuable. I would argue that the people coming in to your booth, probably are some of your most motivated, potential clients. I ended up with +400 business cards from people I believe can become some of my most important clients.

Product feedback. The detailed feedback you get and the possibility to develop your product together with the potential client.

Meeting competitors that may become future partners.

If you run a company and don’t do trade shows, I would recommend you try one.

If you are in the trademark or domain name business, I suggest we meet at the next INTA annual meeting, in Hong Kong 2014.

The total number of different “words” are over 130.000. The distribution is as usual: 90 percent are used less than 5 times, like PINTEREST and JABRA, and the top 10 percent are used up to 2000 times, like ONE and LOVE.

Popular USPTO trademark words

What words were popular 2012 when it came to getting a US trademark registration?

A new word on the top list is CLOUD, wich was strong already in 2011 with 372 occurrences and this year made it to the top list when it showed up in 454 trademarks applications. Compare that with 2006, when CLOUD only showed up in 28 trademark applications.

Other trademark words moving up on the list are: WATER, FREE, STAR, BODY an NATIONAL.

Single letters are very popular in trademark filings, like T, N and E. A rising star here is the letter M, which appears in more than 700 trademark applications last year compared to 450 the year before.

Words moving down on the list are GREEN, REAL, USA and SOCIAL.

The top 100 USPTO trademark words 2012:

1

life

51

day

2

solutions

52

black

3

world

53

water

4

one

54

red

5

love

55

america

6

new

56

fresh

7

health

57

natural

8

be

58

our

9

american

59

bar

10

care

60

b

11

home

61

s

12

t

62

free

13

go

63

plus

14

n

64

music

15

good

65

city

16

power

66

do

17

all

67

more

18

up

68

out

19

center

69

x

20

live

70

usa

21

energy

71

star

22

smart

72

from

23

me

73

sports

24

co

74

way

25

green

75

social

26

no

76

art

27

big

77

kids

28

services

78

that

29

better

79

c

30

business

80

first

31

its

81

make

32

technology

82

mobile

33

get

83

living

34

international

84

not

35

pro

85

service

36

e

86

foundation

37

m

87

body

38

real

88

national

39

club

89

can

40

de

90

systems

41

time

91

healthy

42

best

92

great

43

network

93

people

44

blue

94

1

45

design

95

institute

46

management

96

house

47

just

97

cloud

48

food

98

where

49

system

99

little

50

global

100

association

Note that we have eliminated the most common “stop words” like THE, IS, AT, YOU, AND etc, and some company attributes like INC, LLC, COMPANY and GROUP.

Popular EU trademark words

We have also done a similar analysis of the very popular EU trademark registration called CTM (from OHIM). A CTM (Community Trade Mark) covers 27 countries and many languages. Surprisingly there is not a large difference between the EU trademark list and the US trademarks. English is the dominating language, at least in the in the pan-European trademark registration CTM.

A couple of trademark words you find in the CTM top list that you don’t find in the USPTO top list: ECO, HOTEL, LONDON, QUALITY, ROYAL, EASY, EUROPEAN and PARIS.

Markify’s trademark search engine just became a lot more global. We have added another 650.000 international trademarks to our trademark search engine.

All these trademarks come from the WIPO trademark database, sometimes called “ROMARIN”. (WIPO is the United Nation’s organization that administrates the Madrid system, through which you can get a trademark registration in approx. 80 countries.)

I think this means that Markify today is the world’s only free trademark search engine that covers both the US (USPTO), EU (CTM/OHIM) and international (WIPO) trademarks.

A total of almost 4 million live trademarks, updated every 24 hours with 400.000 new marks per year.

We are also the only free trademark search that gives you a proper list of confusingly similar trademarks, where there could be a likelihood of confusion.

Some of the other providers try to do this with “fuzzy search”. The problem with “fuzzy search” is that it is “fuzzy”. It misses too much and gives you to much noise. A good similarity algorithm should not be “fuzzy” but very distinct, based on statistics.

We have based our algorithm on more that 10.000 actual cases where a government employee has said that these two trademarks are confusingly similar.

So now you can get the best trademark search results, including all classes, also for WIPO trademarks – for free.

Disclaimer: These articles do not constitute legal advice and should not be
relied upon as such. Consult with a lawyer about your particular case.
Markify is a name-screening tool and there is no guarantee that it
will find all potentially conflicting trademark registrations or that
the found "similar" trademarks will pose a problem in the naming
matter at hand.